A Common Pornography: A Memoir Read online

  One P, Another L

  The family name was originally spelled Samsel. Some time in the 1930s, when my dad was a kid, his mother changed it slightly, adding the P and extra L. Apparently, someone named Samsel had committed some terrible crime that summer and she didn’t want her kids going to school with that name.

  Spirits

  Two of the neighborhood kids, Willie and Todd, joined my brother Matt and me in a game we had invented. We’d make a quick buzzing sound and become a “spirit,” which was like a superhero. There were good guy spirits and bad guy spirits, and each one had a special power.

  Matt’s main spirit, The Claw, had a dangerous weapon called the Brain Hold. There was no defense against this hold but Matt was fair by not doing it all the time. He’d often yell, “Brain Hold!” whenever he was going to do it. I had one spirit that was so fast he could run around the house several times and not look like he was moving at all. I had to tell my friends when he was done running. I imagined that this spirit might have a female sidekick, but there were no girls who would play with us. Todd’s sister was about our age, but we all teased her because she wasn’t pretty and her name was Sissy.

  At night, in our bedroom, Matt and I would talk about what our spirits were going to do next, and discuss maybe killing off some of our old spirits for new ones. It was highly dramatized and loosely scripted, like the professional wrestling we watched on Saturdays. The show, Big Time Wrestling, was a weekly ritual for us. This was before wrestling became glitzy and hugely marketed. Some of the popular Northwest wrestlers like “Playboy” Buddy Rose, Jimmy Snuka, Jesse Ventura, and “Rowdy” Roddy Piper even came to Kennewick and wrestled at the high school sometimes.

  I was going to make up a spirit with a super brain to combat The Claw and his famous hold, but Willie and Todd moved away and we stopped playing.

  That’s when Matt and I began reading books about Bigfoot.

  Records

  Two plastic record players and a nice stack of Top 40 45s were all I needed to start my own radio station. My plan was to do a pirate radio show that would broadcast to my neighborhood. Instead I just pointed my speakers out the upstairs window and hoped the sound reached the corner.

  In fifth grade I started writing really bad pop song lyrics. When I wrote something I thought to be particularly hit-worthy, I’d cut out a piece of paper in the shape of a 45, and then, after coloring in the black wax area, I’d put the name of my song on the “label.” Some of these hits were “Sound of Thunder,” “Rich Dude,” and “Diamond Girl.” The name I gave myself was Billy Rivers, because I thought it sounded cool.

  After cutting out the center hole, I’d string the smash hit to a hook on my ceiling. I imagined I was a megastar. Sometimes I’d even put them on one of the turntables and watch them spin. Forty-five revolutions per minute. Once I put a needle on one as it spun and ruined the needle. I had to go to the record store, where they sold little smoking pipes and stoner posters, spending my entire five-dollar allowance on a new snap-on needle.

  OK 95

  The popular radio station was OK 95. They hosted a discount at the River-Vue Drive-In movie once and I went with a bunch of friends and one of their parents. We loaded up a station wagon full of people and got in for ninety-five cents. Some people from the radio station were giving out records as we drove in. My friends and I stuck our heads out the windows to see what they had. There were a couple of boxes full of albums, but it was all stuff we had never heard of. They were probably rejects, bands from small labels that sent their records to the station in hopes of getting their big break. A dozen cars behind us started to get impatient, revving their engines and honking their horns, but we didn’t know what to take. Finally, the radio station people gave each of us a random record. They all looked suspiciously like hard rock, which OK 95 wasn’t playing at the time. I ended up with a record by Krokus. It was called Hardware. When I listened to it later, I was repulsed by the music—a tasteless sort of stoner metal. There was one song in particular called “Smelly Nelly” that talked about a girl’s crotch. It has the worst lyrics ever (“Her skin is dry and spotty but her ass is just the best”). I’m sure OK 95 was glad to be rid of all those records.

  Wet

  At halftime of the high school football game, Dad and I walked down the bleachers and waited for our turn in the bathroom. There was a long urinal where about six people could go at once. Dad and I went side by side and he seemed to be watching me as I pulled my pants down to my knees and went.

  When we were back outside, standing in line to get hot dogs, he explained to me that I didn’t have to pull my pants down to pee. He pointed to our zippers, showing me how they were made to open up so just our peters came out. I felt embarrassed, not realizing that people were probably staring at me in there, wondering why I had to pull my pants all the way down. I believe I was eleven at this time. I wore tight white briefs and probably didn’t change them enough. Soon after this talk, I also stopped wetting my bed at night.

  J. V. Cain

  In 1979, two years after I became a big football fan, J. V. Cain, the starting tight end of my favorite team, the Cardinals, died suddenly in training camp. It was the first time I felt shocked by a death. He died on his twenty-sixth birthday. I rode my bike to the drug store every day that week to read the national newspapers to see if they figured out what the cause was.

  There was one particular J. V. Cain touchdown that I’ll never forget. It was against the Browns in a close game. He ran a simple ten-yard hook pattern to the goal line and turned to catch. The ball was overthrown but J. V. reached up with a larger-than-life right hand and pulled it down like he was tearing a bird out of the sky. It seemed unbelievable.

  The drug store kept their newspapers by the magazine rack, away from the busy cash register area, so it was easy for me to tear through the sports section every day without the clerk shooing me away. I read multiple papers, speculated with friends, and even asked the family doctor about what would cause such a bewildering death. Eventually it was announced as a heart attack. The team retired Cain’s jersey number 88 and wore black armbands that season, which turned out to be another terrible one.

  Silhouette

  Matt and I saw a spaceship skipping through the sky. We reacted at the same time, surprised we both saw it. We stayed up late that night, sleeping outside on our side porch in our sleeping bags. We talked about UFOs and Bigfoot. We planned a Bigfoot hunt near Walla Walla when we got older.

  After falling asleep, exhausted from speculation, I awoke sometime in the middle of the night. Unsure why I was dream-interrupted, I lifted my head to look around. Roughly twenty yards away, near the alley and beside the garbage cans, stood a large figure with its legs slightly spread and its arms at its sides. It was a silhouette similar to that on a men’s room door. We had a dog at the time, a shaggy black mutt named Pebbles who was about the size of a breadbox. He was looking at the figure too, but he didn’t make a sound. I froze and kept my eyes on the figure. It seemed to be watching Matt and me sleep.

  The next morning we called the radio station to see if there were other sightings of a strange light in the sky. There were. We talked about it all morning until Dad got agitated and told us to zip our mouths. I’m pretty sure that Dad believed in UFOs too, so I was surprised he got angry. It was probably against the Bible for Catholics to openly believe in UFOs or something. I never got around to mentioning the shadowy figure by the garbage cans. I thought maybe I was dreaming.

  Almost ten years later, while discussing that night with Matt, he told me he had seen the same silhouette, and that’s why he never wanted to sleep outside again.

  Black

  My brother Matt is black. We have the same mother but little was known about his father, who was an African man named Everest Mulekezi. Our mother dated Everest for a short time after meeting him at a dance in Eastern Washington. He was a foreign student attending Washington State University.

  Mom and Dad had split up at thi
s time, though they would eventually get back together and have me a couple years later.

  There was only one other black kid in our neighborhood. His name was Larry, and we were friends with him for a while. One time Matt and Larry got into a fight about something though, and Larry called my brother a “half breed.”

  Just two weeks later, Larry drowned in the Columbia River. We went to his funeral at a black church in Pasco. His family became hysterical. I think it was his sister who started screaming and had to be taken away. We left early.

  When Matt turned thirty-five, he decided to look for his father. His search took him to Africa, where he met several family members but learned that his father had died in 1971 in Uganda. He was some sort of a district official who was executed by Idi Amin’s army after a dispute over a hotel bill. The rest of Everest’s family was hunted as well, but most of them escaped.

  There was an odd moment during his African trip that Matt told me about. He had just met his real father’s sister for the first time and many of his other relatives were coming to her apartment to meet him. As he sat and talked and got buzzed on a terrible-tasting local brew consisting of smashed up bananas and alcohol, he realized that his newfound relatives were watching him extra close, almost studying him. Matt asked them if something was wrong. They paused and then smiled and told Matt that he did indeed display parts of his father. He had his dad’s mannerisms and his determination. Physically they could see Everest in Matt’s eyes, forehead, and hands. Though he never knew his father in life, Matt had been carrying his ghost for all these years. He felt this ghost become more a part of him now, and with his family circled around him, he began to weep.

  Cherokee Pride

  Matt and I played out some game while listening to one of our favorite 45s, “Indian Reservation” by Paul Revere and the Raiders. We would take turns playing the roles. One of us would be the sad and angry Indian in jail while the other was the guard. Around this time was when the TV commercial with the crying Indian was so popular—the anti-littering one.

  “Indian Reservation” was one of the biggest hits for this band of white guys who dressed in pirate outfits. It seemed to have this great dramatic sense of impending revenge that pulsed just behind the drumbeat and the heartfelt sentiment of the singer/narrator. It was like a story song. The chorus went something like: “Cherokee people, Cherokee tribe / So proud to live, so proud to die.”

  Sometimes at the end of the song we’d pretend to fight, and one day we actually did. He was twisting my arm really hard and I threw a wild punch at his groin. It was the only time I ever hurt him.

  Scratchmuback

  As far as I can tell, I am the itchiest person in the world. I think it started when I was a small kid and started to demand back scratching from Mom. Every day for probably too many years, often multiple times a day, I would sit on Mom’s lap and say, “Scratch my back.” But it was more like one word: Scratchmuback. She never tired of doing it and probably spoiled me for all my future girlfriends, many of whom did in fact say that I was the itchiest person in the world. Many of my itches are in places that I can easily reach, but I still get a strange pleasure from asking someone to scratch my elbow, ear, or nose.

  For most of my thirties, I even developed an odd patch of skin on the outside of my left nipple. It was dry and slightly scaly and scratching it gave me the greatest pleasure. I knew that it probably wasn’t healthy, but I didn’t want to get rid of it because that would put an end to all those moments of scratching pleasure. It was simply known as “the Patch.” My girlfriends thought it was weird when I explained it to them but they reluctantly humored me when I would ask them to “Scratchmupatch.”

  I did try some lotions and creams, halfheartedly hoping to cure myself, but it wouldn’t go away. Eventually a prescription steroid gel did the job and the Patch faded away.

  Sometimes if I scratch in that same spot, I can still feel a trace of pleasure.

  Grapes

  Sometimes, when I was very little, we’d go to my grandparents’ house, on the other side of Kennewick. Dad’s mom and dad.

  They lived right across from Kamiakin High School and had several rows of impressive grape vines and a big garden. Matt and Mark and I would sometimes spend hours there, picking grapes and goofing around in their big barn. When we got hungry, Grandma would make toast and a special milk drink with malted milk powder or strawberry Quik. Grandpa always drank buttermilk. It almost made me sick to watch him drink it because it was so lumpy.

  During the week, students from the high school would sit in their yard during lunch break and leave behind their trash. Grandpa told them to clean up after themselves or not sit there. Some of the kids got mad about this and began leaving more trash in the yard, sometimes in the middle of the night. One day, while talking to one of the kids, Grandpa had a heart attack and died. That was the first funeral I ever went to.

  Soon after that, Grandma sold the house and property to the Welch’s company, who wanted to expand the vineyard. The house was vandalized and riddled with graffiti: spray-painted swear words and pentagrams and swastikas. A couple of years later, the land was leveled and an apartment complex was built.

  Grandma lived her last years in Walla Walla, a town I hated for no good reason. But whenever we drove there to visit her, there was a big wooden sign in the shape of the Jolly Green Giant that Matt and I thought was cool. We mimicked the jingle (“Ho ho ho—Green Giant!”) and then went back to playing Slugbug.

  Grandma died in Walla Walla.

  Car-Mull

  Jeffrey was a snot-nosed neighbor kid who was a year younger than me. He hadn’t even reached the wisdom of a double-digit age. My brother Matt seemed ancient and stoic at the ripe age of fourteen by comparison. I looked up to him and any kid who was older than eleven. Matt always seemed older than he actually was.

  Once we told Jeffrey that all the bird poop on our car was caramel. We sat on the hood and pretended to pinch some in our fingers. We brought our fingers up to our lips and pretended to chew and smack our lips. We were convincing and Jeffrey smeared some onto his tongue. “Where does it come from?” he asked.

  We told him that when rain drips from certain trees, it becomes caramel.

  “My mom won’t let me eat caramel,” he said. He pronounced it “car-mull.”

  “We won’t tell her if you don’t,” I said.

  Fights

  Sometimes Mom and Dad got into unexplainable fights. I wasn’t sure where the tension was coming from at the time. (I’m sure what happened with Elinda had something to do with it, but I had no idea about that yet.) Dad had typical gripes, like Mom not having dinner ready on time. Sometimes Mom would question Dad about staying at the bar too long after work. I remember him saying, “They kept buying me drinks. What am I supposed to do, say no?”

  My dad had a quick temper and things escalated without warning. There were fists thrown, choke holds, objects broken. I would go to my room and jump into bed, crying and pressing my head into the pillows to mute the noise, though I still felt it pounding like an earthquake through the walls. Sometimes Matt would do the same thing.

  Eventually, when we were older and bigger, there was a time when Matt got fed up with the fights and decided to do something. He stepped between them and pressed Dad against the wall, his strong arm under Dad’s chin, and told him, “You’re not going to talk to Mom like that. You’re not going to hit her again.” Dad’s body was tensed and surprised at Matt’s strength. He started to panic and asked Matt to let him go. After that, he never got mad when Matt was around. He became more passive. He looked at Matt sometimes with eyes that shyly asked, Are we okay? Is everything cool between us?

  Centerfolds

  Todd’s family lived right across the alley behind us. His dad was always working on his race car in their garage, and it was the loudest thing in the neighborhood. He raced it at the local speedway and in other cities too. Sometimes I’d go in there and ask if Todd was around and his dad would le
t me cut through their backyard to get to the front of their house. The reason I liked going into the garage most, though, was because Todd’s dad had a bunch of Playboy centerfolds up on the walls. I remember seeing Playboy centerfolds in other people’s garages too. But there were pictures from other magazines as well. Women wearing bikinis or torn shirts and leaning on motorcycles or across the hood of a hot rod. Maybe having all those naked women around helped Todd’s dad feel better about all the time he worked on his car.

  One time when I was over at Todd’s, I had to use the bathroom and walked in while his mom was in the shower. I stopped for a second and started to back out. But then I realized that she didn’t know I was in there. She was on the other side of these thick and blurry shower doors. I saw her warped image as she rubbed the water and shampoo into her hair, the shape of her body out of focus. It felt like my bladder was about to burst, but I stared for a long time while holding it in.